The card features 1600*2 stream processors, core/memory clock of 850/1200MHz (4800MHz), 4GB of memory, and six mini-DisplayPort connectors for six displays. The card employs dual 8-pin power design, with the turbo fan centrally located to enhance the cooling performance for both GPUs.

dear gawdz...

well, although it's $1,000, you'd probably save some money since you wouldn't have a heating bill. Just turn on the comp. hehehe

Fermi's benchmark results should come as no surprise. The 6-month delay indicated to me that it would be an underwhelming part once it was finally released. Sure, it beats the 5870, but it draws more power than the dual-GPU 5970 in order to do it. Impressive!

No, it's not quite a failure of GeForce FX proportions, but, especially at the typically outrageous asking price, Fermi is still a dud. ATI wins this round.

"They should rename the team to the Washington Government Sucks. Put Obama on the helmet. Line the entire walls of the stadium with the actual text of the ACA.

Fix their home team score on the board to the debt clock, they can win every game 17,000,000,000,000 to 24. Losing team gets taxed by the IRS 100%, then droned."

Arguably - they both have failed. When software devs are still outstripping the ability of mainstream desktop hardware(even at the enthusiast grade), it's indiciative that the way cards are designed need to be re-evaluated.

Are they just going to keep cramming stream processors, more hot'n'steamy GDDR5 and then demand users sport 1000W PSUs to run the damn things??

It reeks of inefficiency. I can tell them what they need to do next, all they have to do is ask

If you were only talking about Fermi I would have to agree, but the ATI cards are a different story. Their power usage is very good, even at full load, which is particularly impressive given that they are essentially twice the GPU of the previous generation.

EDIT: Just found this:

"They should rename the team to the Washington Government Sucks. Put Obama on the helmet. Line the entire walls of the stadium with the actual text of the ACA.

Fix their home team score on the board to the debt clock, they can win every game 17,000,000,000,000 to 24. Losing team gets taxed by the IRS 100%, then droned."

at any rate, its my opinion that Fermi is a dud. for cryin out loud, the card is pulling 400+W when running Furmark and almost 400W in just about everything else. what really gets under my skin with Fermi is that it doesn't offer up much in the way of a performance edge, and they want a $100 premium for it. if this was the old 8800GTX vs 2900XT, that $100 would be a no brainer, but not this time.

to be fair, i have to agree with Astro as well. the 5800 series isn't as impressive as it probably should have been, and its not exactly lean on the wattage, either. am i happy with my 5850?? absolutely. its just that i really feel that AMD could've put more into it than they did. sure, the strategy of simply building a competitive product that you can sell at a lower price point has worked well for them, but i just think that it should've been a bigger step up from the previous generation than it is.

lolz - that must have taken some ATI fanboy a good 20mins of paint.exe skillz but provided a lifetime of glee That grilled meat actually is looking pretty lovely [/hungry]

The pic would be more accurate showing JHH destroying Al Gore and the environment, due to the excessive power draw required by Fermi.

As far as heat goes, any high end card sporting GDDR5 is not exactly going to be cool 'Tis the nature of the beast. Blame those fools at Qimonda/Infineon for making the Prescott of Graphics RAM. At the end of the day, NV/ATI will always be limited by what the foundries are churning out - and if that itself id based on a design that lends itself to high temps and increased power draw... well what do you expect??

At least we have some competition in the graphics card business again though I'm not sure that prices are coming down all that much as of yet. Just did some spot checking at Newegg and other online retailers and and it looks like they've sold out of all their GTX 480's and 460's. Guess there was a lot of pent up demand out there.

So any thoughts on the recent infatuation with 3D display technology, especially when applied to gaming and home theater? I know I'm all for it as it's just one more step towards "holy grail" of holographic projection. I've been starting to think about getting a new TV to replace my old CRT one but I may wait to see how all this 3D tech develops over the next year.

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I'd hold off on it charr. There are companies out there working hard to incorporate 3D into the TV directly, so you won't need those RIDICULOUS glasses, which if you ask your gramps - will tell you that he wore to watch the three stooges 3D movie in the 1950s.

One such company is alioscopy - I found out about them when I came across an article about my fave director(Mr David Lynch) raving about it..

Once that tech is perfected for the mass market, the eager fools who rushed out and bought the 1950s nostalgia kit coming on the market now are going to have some pretty expensive fashion accessories.

Fig.1. Seeing amusing images of JHH are popular atm - here is one relevant to 3D

Unfortunately, 3d projection is still a whiles away - simply because the way our current tech works is limited by cost and size. I see those large curved displays getting big over the next few years - imagine something like a car windscreen - and curved to fit just within peripheral vision. This will become more feasible once printable/flexible oled is ready for a larger format.

AMD fans may be excited to learn that AMD has just posted a profit of $257 million for the first quarter of 2010.

However, before you anyone gets too excited, please bear in mind that these figures are still affected by the $125 Billion payout Intel gave AMD late last year - so it's not all down to how awesome the newer phenoms or 5xxx series are. Before the payout, AMD hadnt posted a profit for three years.

In related news, despite Fermi being hotter than a stripper's thong. it's still selling well. One factor is the relatively limited number of these first gen cards. Reading around tech forums, there is also a pervading opinion that alot of folks are waiting for a subsequent revision of these GPUs by board partners such as EVGA, XFX etc that will be a bit more power/heat efficient.

In any event, AMD not falling in a heap is still good news for competition, and the 5xxx series has definitely given them a shot in the arm from a cash perspective.

Lets hope they can keep up the positive trend once the financial impact of the Intel payout has well and truly passed.

In other AMD news, expreview has posted a preview of the Phenom II 1055T Hexacore CPU, which has apparently already gone retail in parts of Asia - so if you are super keen, you can now easily get one from fleabay for about $350USD

Yea, but it'd be hard to be an AMD fanboy if I was asking intel for stuff

Back when the Athlons reigned and cool n quiet was exactly just that, I was a proud AMD phanboy as far as CPUs go, but there has been seriously nothing to get excited about since then. K10 promised sooo much, and was a massive anticlimax in the end once we had seen the what the corei7 could do.

Most market commentators looking back on the goodness that was Athlon conclude that AMDs success had just as much to do with a bad decision by intel(cough*netburst*cough) than by any dazzling achievement of their own.

AMD had maintained their steady, but slow, evolution - whereas Intel took a massive step back with netburst. It really wasn't until they threw that out and brought put Core2Duo that they were able to pick up from where they left off.

Add to that some equally disturbing management decisions by Senor Ruiz. AMD survives for some very finite reasons:

UK android fans are about to get the almighty Nexus One, though if you are a fan of the HTC sense interface, best wait until the HTC Desire hits the streets. Both feature the 1Ghz Snapdragon processor and a mammoth screen at 800x480. Beauteous

Pic - HTC Desire, Legend and Google Nexus One. As you can see the Nexus one/Desire have a massive screen, and is just a bit bigger than than the iphone in total size. The HTC Legend is a unique phone, just 600MHz, but has a single piece aluminum body - definitely for those into sturdier phones - I was thinking of getting one until I saw the Desire in store today... WANT!

This is one of the coolest hands on vids I've seen about these phones. No nervous tech show guy/girl rabbiting on. lolz@ English dude who got confused about how to make a call...

YouTube Video

In the US - the Verizon HTC Incredible is also turning heads.. it has a unique look and all the benefits of Android 2.1. Engadget did a great review HERE

The potential for awesomeness is pretty high - Imagine the loveliness of palm's WebOS on some HP hardware. A web OS tablet would kick the pants off the iPad from a functionality POV....and because its HP, the whole printing element the iPad suffers from would not exist.....

many geeks are excited - prompting some photoshop phun of webOS on HP devices

Also, Drew Henry of Nvidia gave an interview to Digitimes - stating that nvidia will be looking to release a GPU with 512 Stream Processors.

Looks like they're quite aware that Fermi didn't live up to the delay/expectation/hype. Lets just hope those extra SPs don't make the damn things any hotter

RE: new smartphones
This is good stuff. I'm starting to pay closer attention to smartphones now as I plan to get a new mobile phone in July-August timeframe. At this point I think it's probably going to boil down to the iPhone and an Android-powered phone.

No self respecting tech head would get an iphone Char...android all the way!

*ducks projectile hurled by negsun*

I just got the HTC Desire... to feel the awesomeness of 1GHz Snapdragon in my hands... and that screen.......phaw! I thoroughly recommend UK sellers Clove.uk - who ship all over the place. I got the HTC Desire sim unlocked over $100AUD cheaper than the cheapest one on fleabay.

I came across a great new proggie for iphone and android users, called Missing Sync, the current beta can even sync your phone/android handset with selected pc folders wirelessly through wifi/bluetooth!

In other news, Asus have finally launched their EeeKeyboard, hearkening back to the days of the Amiga etc, where the pc was built into the computer. Pretty nifty

Apple and MS really want us to embrace HTML5 early, with H.264 as the embedded video codec of choice -- as opposed to the truly "open" theora standard.

Yeah, mac fanboi as I am.. I'd rather wait on the HTML5 until it's at least 'finalized' Kinda like riding a bike without putting the front wheel on it first. Sure you can do it... but don't count on getting as far as you 'could'..

Quote:

Funnily enough, both MS and Apple make money whenever devs will need to use this codec in their apps, cheeky buggers

no different than Adobe / Flash

bleh.. but enough of the mac/pc/flash/android/iphone/blah blah pissing match. I love'em both/all and would die before giving up my mac or my Creative Suite hehehe

Indeed.. android ftw. Though technically, it could have been executed on any ARM device. But only android has that geeky Linux allure of course.

It was just a matter of time, but reports by US market analysts are trickling out saying that android has just knocked off iphone from having the second highest market share for smartphones (in the US). RIMs Blackberry still have number one spot... like with all market data that doesn't reveal how they arrived at their results... take it with a grain of salt... but not a huge one. It's a shame that European/Asian market data isn't available because the story would be quite different - where android has a much more widespread market presence because of manufacturers like HTC, Samsung and Sony/Ericsson being based in Asia.

In browser news, Google is almost set to roll out Chrome Version 6. The Chrome Browser has come along in leaps and bounds, and now has an extensions gallery not unlike firefox - it will also have inbuilt flash support. I love the look of chrome, but am still attached to particular extensions of FF (eg. google redesigned, integrated gmail) - so get the chrome look in FF with the chromifox extreme extension/theme.

As far as portable browsers go, I've found that chromium portable is a bit more robust that FF Portable - especially if you're deploying on an older/slower rig at work/school/grandmas etc.

Some mega-epic-awesome news was reported by TechCrunch today, notifying that the upcoming Android 2.2 build Froyo(all Android builds are named after desserts) will have in-built USB tethering and the ability to make your phone a wifi hotspot.... no more third party apps or hackarounds required

This is interesting - looks like Galaxy are showing of some single slot GTX 470s. My being able to read Turkish yields no extra advantage I'm afraid - even though this was originally reported on Turkish site Donanim Haber, Bright Side of News have done a decent job at summarising the article without missing anything fabulous.

Id love to see a single slot GTX 480 with some more moderate temps \o/ and where the hell is that GTX 490 all us folders pine for

Is it permissible to use Fudzilla as a source in this hallowed thread? Anyway, the folks at Fudzilla claim the dual GF100 got scrapped due to overly high power consumption (not a big surprise there if you ask me). Supposedly the "new and improved" GF104 will be used in NVIDIA's dual-GPU card to compete with the 5970.

I may be interested in the GF104 if its rumored specs turn out to be real. Trying to keep to no more than a single 6-pin power connector for my rig's graphics card and with an alleged 150W TDP and 256 SP's/CUDA cores/whatever-the-latest-term-is the GF104 sounds like it may have a shot at that.

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lolz. Good ole Fudzilla. The main thing that irks me about them is how they sometimes forget to tell you about a source. Also, when a post starts out with "It looks" bolded, rather than telling you about their source, it's usually time to reach for the salt.

That all being said, this sounds plausible Though the fact that eternal nvidia fanboys brightside haven't said anything is perhaps a cause for mild concern

EDIT: A techPowerUp post dated March 26th discusses most of what has been spouted by the Fudsters. The Source of the techpowerup article is German site 3dcentre, which you can read Google translates English mangling of HERE Interesting stuff to say the least.

If team green can pull it off.. it's going to melt crysis face, a good two years after everyone has stopped playing it

Some mega-epic-awesome news was reported by TechCrunch today, notifying that the upcoming Android 2.2 build Froyo(all Android builds are named after desserts) will have in-built USB tethering and the ability to make your phone a wifi hotspot.... no more third party apps or hackarounds required

Ah, something Palm's WebOS has been doing on Verizon since January and since April for free.

For those who aren't phone OS phanboys like tk and me, WebOS is indeed also built on a Linux kernel....but unlike android is NOT fully open source (some propietary snippets in there which are about the only thing Palm did right business wise!)

As previously reported. Palm have taken a fabulous concept/product like webOS and turned their company into a basket case because they do not have the hardware nouse of someone like Motorola, Samsung, SonyEricsson, HTC or dare I say Apple. Subsequently, they were snapped up by HP just last month.

The HP[alm]acquisition has the potential of being a stunning combination - we'd all love to see a webOS tablet.

The mass market appeal that android is achieving is most definitely not because it flaunts its Linux underpinnings.

eg. Oz's largest Telecommunications co. has just jumped on the android bandwagon in a huge way - and nowhere in all its web or TV/radio/print presence has the Linux factor been mentioned in their official releases. Saying "Google's exciting new operating system" sounds much cooler

They want to promote the device as an iphone alternative, and bringing in the Linux factor is probably not the best way to advertise that. In fact, the only places you will find that really flaunt the android/linux angle are linux focussed sites like linuxfordevices.com and dev sites like xda. ie. places where non tech savvy mortals will never tread.

The smartphone market is going to get every interesting very quick! With iPhoneOS4 and Windows Phone 7 around the corner, Android going from strength to strength, a healthy WebOS device presence would be a welcome addition.

* * *

In other news, the Google IO Conference wrapped up recently - with most of the news being more exciting to developer folk. Three things that were announced that hold particular interest:

*VP8 web video format launched as open source WebM project. has already been incorporated into nightly builds of chrome and FF. Adobe already announced as partners, and early indications are that MS will support it for IE9. This is really great news for devs who were starting to feel ill at the thought of H.264 licensing fees demanded by Apple/MS.

*Google Wave is now open to the public

*Chrome Apps store is being developed, to tie in with future Chrome OS devices. A demo of an entirely browser based 'plants vs zombies' and lego star wars was shown, indicating the interesting potential of the ChromeOS. Whether it takes off is still too hard to call. >>source

* * *

Engadget has just published its HTC EVO 4G Review. Looks like a truly amazing device for those lucky enough to live in a 4G zone, and who don't mind phones 'big n beautiful'. This thing is Huge - and is capable of 720p video out via built in HDMI

To illustrate the hugeness...Here's a pic of it next to the nexus 1 which is essentially the same size as an iphone.

if your're a zune fan, you may want to see how WP7 pans out first.. An LG prototype was being shown off the other day across the interwebs

Pretty slick looking. MS have also announced that the WP7 phones will be incorporating their own version of maps/navigation via its Bing service.

* * *

Owners of slightly older lappies may be excited at the prospect of MSI external GPU dock. Recently unveiled at Computex, It connects via an express card slot and has its own power supply - currently rated at 84WTDP - which would limit it to something such as the Radeon 5670.

Future versions will sport USB3 and a higher TDP capacity. Having the freedom to put an updated Dx11 GPU in two year old lappie is great news IMO - and having it in an external dock takes away the heat concerns when you're throttling an internal mobile-gpu. If implemented well, it sounds like a super idea.

The Google I/O Conference has wrapped up, and on top of the stuff mentioned above, and confirmation of Android 2.2(Froyo), which some Nexus1 users have already received as an over the air update, the other *bug* news was Google's announcement of their plans to get into the webTV game.

Other companies have tried it before, how will they go?? They have some heavy sitters on their side already, like intel, logitech and sony. Indications are it will have Hulu integration, though I imagine that is still limited to US users only

I like the concept. If I had a Google TV that displayed at 1080p, would Hulu's 480p stream still do it for me as far as image quality goes? I've never really looked into it as I'm still using a 480 CRT for my TV. I've heard the term upscaling but since my TV doesn't display at a resolution that could even utilize upscaling...

I wonder what ISP's are thinking about their network bandwidth utilization if this really takes off. I'd drop my cable TV service and go with Google TV if I could get all the programming that I wanted through Google TV. If you had a lot of people doing this though I can't imagine that the cable TV companies would be that thrilled.

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I like the concept. If I had a Google TV that displayed at 1080p, would Hulu's 480p stream still do it for me as far as image quality goes?

Alot of online content, even p2p still gets pumped out at sub 480p and looks fine even on a 1080p display. You only really notice if you're sitting up close

It's hard to see how Google TV is going to pan out at this stage. The HTPC crowd want it to be an uber device with tuner support, whereas these first iterations are instead chosing to usurp control of existing set top boxes through IR blasters and such.

I can see it being something built into HDTVs in the future, like current internet enabled TVs, but whether it takes off depends on how user friendly the interface is and what the content is like.

nvidia's new beta drivers are out - 257.15. I don't know why there is a 60point version jump, but it looks like its here to stay, as they are official beta drivers, not a .inf tweak job by some anonymous nerd on a creepy tech forum

expreview did a nice little rundown of some performance differences, using a GTX480 test bed:

Speaking of Fermi, the GTX 480M has been announced.... Grill Force in a lappie?? Sounds a bit scary to me, but no benchies yet, so the jokes must be put on hold

Also, Guru3D got their hands on a Zotac 480, with some noticeable temp differences from the references benchies. You can read the review >>here

In other amusing news, Michael Arrington, founder of tech blog TechCrunch has finally had his chickens come home to roost. Famous for shooting his mouth off about Yahoo, it seems he met his match in feisty Yahoo CEO, Carol Bartz, who firmly told him to "F**k off" in an interview.

I wont embed vid directly, but you can see Carol drop the F bomb, and the whole interview in context at this brightside article

Arrington is an archetypal chubby tech geek with a big mouth, Carol is a pioneering woman in the 'mans world' of tech. She has worked for Digital, 3M, and took autodesk to its modern day strength. In comparison to that, Arrington hasn't done much at all - which Carol pointed out to him in tremendous fashion